Movie review: Man of Steel

"Zod off!!"

Look, this isn't an awful film. But it isn't a particularly good one, either. Spoilers ahead.

On Krypton, scientist Jor-El stands before the ruling council demanding that they allow him to rescue the Kryptonians' collective genetic code from the cataclysm about to destroy their planet. They don't listen. Suddenly, general Zod enters the chamber, accompanied by soldiers, announcing that he's taking over government to save Krypton from these ineffective talkers. Jor-El escapes, stealing the code and bringing it to his home in order to send it, with his newborn son Kal-El, into space, to Earth.

Then the film starts going downhill, unfortunately.

Jor-El's wife Lara doesn't want to send her son away, because what if he dies out there in space? That he's about to die on Krypton when it explodes doesn't seem to matter to her. Then, when she finally agrees to let Jor-El send the boy off – and keep in mind that Zod and his soldiers are on their way to take the Kryptonian genetic codes back, so time's a-wasting – she refuses to let him go, holding on to him as long as possible. Zod then arrives with his soldiers, who seem happy to let their leader walk into an enemy's lair in front of them, apparently unarmed. In fact, most of them stay outside and just two of them walk 5-10 meters behind him, carrying guns that they apparently don't know how to use because Jor-El can grab a gun and shoot them both before they can pull the triggers of their weapons.

Jor-El, the scientist, proceeds to beat the crap out of the soldier Zod, send his son and the Kryptonians' genetic code away into space, and get killed by Zod because nobody in this movie seems to care one bit about actually disarming and tying up violent enemies. Zod walks out to his waiting soldiers, who haven't done anything useful like shooting down the ship leaving their enemy's lair. Kryptonian armed forces thus arrive to capture them before they can stop the ship, and they get sentenced to the Phantom Zone for their crimes. After that, Krypton eventually explodes, killing Lara and everybody else on the planet.

So, what do we have so far? Standard Hollywood writing, where everything is about striding about and making pompous declarations and watching some marvelous imagery from the CGI people. There is nothing much to suggest imminent threat in the scenes, no need for anybody to rush anything because they'll always have time to do whatever is necessary to reach the various plot points outlined in John Truby's The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller or Blake Snyder's Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, two books that have done their fair share to ruin Hollywood films in general by insisting on stereotypical structuring of movie scripts. Instead, we get sentimental moments with Lara, put in there for no other reason than to hit the audience over the head with "it's tough for a mother to be separated from her child forever", as if the actress couldn't have shown that through actual acting. We also get Zod showing himself as evil, through his treasonous behavior and cowardly back-stabbing – again, entirely in line with the recipe from Truby, Snyder et al – and we don't confuse the audience with something that might take their attention away from this stuff, like people actually behaving and speaking somewhat realistically, or the top military man of Krypton acting like he knows anything about war and fighting at all.

Anyway, over to Kal-El's – or Clark Kent, the name given to him by his adoptive parents Jonathan and Martha Kent – life on Earth. He does good without revealing himself and his powers to humanity, moving from job to job as something happens that makes him have to show his powers. You know, just like David Banner. Turns out, a) the US military has found a spaceship in the Canadian Arctic, b) the US military absolutely sucks at background checks, so Clark can sneak in and work as a handyman on the site. There, he discovers his Kryptonian heritage, Lois Lane discovers him, and his actions lead to Zod and his gang also discovering him, and coming over to join the party, take the Kryptonian genetic code and basically destroy the Earth and mankind to recreate Krypton and the Kryptonian race. Fierce fighting of various kinds ensues.

Henry Cavill actually isn't bad in the role as Superman, but the scripting doesn't give him the backing he should have. For example, Clark and Jonathan Kent fear that if humanity learns about Clark's powers, they'll fear and shun him, a theme that doesn't really work with the Superman mythos, which is really true-blue, mom and apple pie, honest Midwest, etc. The "humans will fear and hate him" theme really belongs with the X-Men, not a Superman movie – unless you do it a whole lot better, like for example not having Clark let his father die a meaningless death in a tornado, because obviously an old man is better equipped to run back in a storm to the family's car to save the dog trapped in it than the young, athletic son who also happens to have superpowers. You sit there watching, saying to yourself, or your friend next to you, "what are they, stupid?".

No, they're just victims of lazy scriptwriting. You want to kill off Jonathan Kent, fine – but do it in a manner that doesn't insult the characters' intelligences (or the audience's).

Final insult: gratuitously inserting Jor-El back into the story as a computer-stored consciousness, just because it's easier to have him drone on with exposition and repeating the basic conflict between him and Zod just in case the audience is too stupid to remember it, even after it was hammered into them at the start of the movie. What is it with moviemakers wanting to put Jor-El back into Clark's life? Come up with a way show the audience what they need to learn without using this exposition crutch, instead.

From there on, the movie is basically lots of super-powered fights between super-strong and nigh-invulnerable people punching each other with little other effect than making the other guy fly some 50-100 meters away and smashing through a lot of housing on the way, plus a standard (see, for example, Batman Begins) "a huuuuge disaster is looming, will the hero be able to stop it (yes of course he will, and everybody knows it)" finale.

What's good about the movie, then? Well, there is some decent acting in it, with Kevin Costner doing the best job as Jonathan Kent; Costner's so good in the role that it's just a damn shame that they kill him off so early, and in such a flimsy manner. Laurence Fishburne is his usual competent self as Perry White even though he doesn't have much of a script to work with, and Russel Crowe is similarly albeit more stereotypically competent as Jor-El. The women in the movie, Lois Lane included, are to a too-great extent sideline-watchers or in need of rescuing. How I miss Margot Kidder, who almost managed to carry the first two Superman movies of the seventies into "good movie" instead of "watchable" territory. (Oh, Reeves was good in the title role, but Kidder put whatever spark there was in those movies – much like Teri Hatcher did with Lois & Clark.) And like I said, I think Cavill does a decent job, but like the others, he doesn't have much of a script to work with; I wonder if Crowe doesn't, in fact, get to do the most acting in the movie.

Also, the movie looks great; art direction, design and CGI is top-notch. But the actual superheroics are too sparse (and too angst-laden) at first, and are a bit too stacked on top of each other with too little cleverness about it in the second half.

So this is a watchable film, but not a necessary one – unless, of course, you love superheroes. If you do, you're pretty much obliged to see it, and to wish that the producers and writers had done a better job with it.

(Post scriptum: I checked to see who'd actually written it, and to not my surprise, it turned out to be David S. Goyer, who also helped write Christopher Nolan's not-very-well-done Batman trilogy. I'll save my gripes about that for a later post, though.)

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol – how NOT to do action-thrillers

OK, so I went to the movies yesterday, which occasioned this unhappy little screed.

The Mission Impossible movie series featuring Tom Cruise has had a rather mixed history. The first film by Brian DePalma was a pretty good action movie with a solid plot, somewhat marred by too-glib dialogue among the supposedly incredibly professional IMF team introduced at the start of the movie, as well as by the fact that Tom Cruise just can't act. But still, worth seeing, and with that brilliant Mission Impossible theme.



The second movie was a mess, with John Woo stringing together overly aestethicized action scenes with a cursory plot, and it didn't help that Cruise can't act. It was watchable once on the big screen, but try re-viewing it on a TV screen; the paper-thin plot breaks almost immediately, and you've already seen the stunts, so what's left? Nothing.

The third one's OK. Some great action sequences, the best being the ones where Cruise has to work with very little resources to handle impossible situations, like when he's chained to a gurney under guard by several IMF agents, and still manages to escape. The love story between him and his fiancée is a bit too much on the syrupy side, but this movie works – even though there is some reason to doubt the tactical competence of somebody going in on a rescue mission with so little ammo that it comes down to having just one bullet left to kill the final bad guy. These people are experts? Really?

And then we have this latest installment, which simply sucks. Oh, the stunts and action scenes are well done, but even when they are, they're often not very good. The scriptwriter and the director have fallen into some oh-so-common traps that plague B movies and TV series; let's look at a couple of them.

First of all – and this is "first of all" because it indicates the lack of respect the film has for its own subject matter – it has a comic relief character. Now, in many teams of various sorts you'll find somebody who's the "comic relief" guy of the team, making jokes and lightening the mood. However, he'll not be providing comic relief by being incompetent at the actual job the team's supposed to be doing, because if he was, he wouldn't be in the team to begin with – especially if the team's job was one where failing at it would mean getting killed.

However, newly promoted field agent Benji Dunn provides "comic relief" not to his team, but for the movie, by being bad at his job. He babbles in English about all sorts of irrelevant stuff when he and Ethan Hunt infiltrate the Kremlin – and this error is compounded by having him state that he's babbling because he's nervous, an admission as good as any by the scriptwriter and the director that "we suck at our jobs, so we'll just have to tell the audience outright what we instead ought to be able to convey through dialogue and characterization". Not only that, but just before Dunn and Hunt start the final, dangerous part of the infiltration, he tells Hunt that "Look, I'm sorry about your wife".

So we learn that there is some tragedy related to Hunt's marriage, but this info comes at a cost to the movie. First, it establishes that Dunn is an idiot and that nobody in his right mind would want him with him on a mission. Second, it dilutes the tension of what should be an incredibly tense, exciting moment. It's right out of the Sloppy Scriptwriting Handbook – and there's more where that came from.

You also have the outright stupid moments, like at the very beginning, when elite IMF agent Trevor Hanaway is killed not really by assassin Sabine Moreau, but by his own mobile phone. See, after his daring escape from the bad guys with the nuclear launch codes which are the movie's MacGuffin, walking along a nearly empty street, he gets an alert signal from his cell phone's facial recognition app that the woman walking towards him is none other than assassin Sabine Moreau. What does this highly trained IMF agent do? He looks down at his cell phone. Seeing the "look out she's a killer ZOMG!" alert on its screen, he then looks up at the person he shouldn't have taken his eyes off, and gets the bullet he so richly deserves from her silenced pistol.

I mean, come on. You're basing your most dramatic scenes on incredibly unprofessional behavior by what's supposed to be the greatest secret agents, and crappily-designed software – I mean, that's hardly user-friendly, is it? So the Sloppy Scriptwriting Handbook strikes again.

All right, back to that Kremlin caper I was talking about. That mission is thwarted by the brilliant evil mastermind that is the movie's bad guy, Swedish physics professor Kurt Hendricks. Not only is Hendricks able to somehow (unexplained to the audience) sneak into the Kremlin and steal whatever he wants including nuclear launch codes, he has also the super-power (shared with the Joker of The Dark Knight) to place whatever amount of explosives he wants wherever he wants without anybody being able to detect it.

Kurt Hendricks is also a major problem in the movie. Not only is he, a middle-aged and somewhat paunchy physics professor, seemingly able to hold his own in a fight with a top-trained IMF agent (good grief), he also has a motivation for his evil deeds that is not even on the level of credibility of a James Bond villain – in fact, it doesn't even reach the level of "comic-book-y". It's like something out of a Menachem Golan movie.

In fact, that is pretty much what this is: a Menachem Golan movie. Its plot, script and internal consistency is pretty much right out of a Chuck Norris cheapo actioneer, albeit one with brilliant production values and excellent instead of cheesy stunts.

One of the few positive points is that the female lead, Paula Patton, is very, very beautiful – but true to form, her supposedly highly trained and professional elite agent character doesn't have the common sense to handcuff a deadly assassin she's apprehended. This somewhat later results in what I'm sure the film makers considered another exciting fight sequence when in fact, all it was was sloppy field work by the agent. Which in turn came straight from, well, you know: the Sloppy Scriptwriting Handbook.

So incredibly not recommended.

So I watched "Tangled"

It's good. In fact, to a large part it's very good, although there are some weaknesses.

First of all, it takes a while before it starts getting interesting; it takes too long setting up the story. This could have been fixed by having better songs for the first couple of musical numbers featuring first Rapunzel and then Rapunzel and her evil "mother" – or somewhat stronger performances of them.

These are very much Alan Menken songs – when I heard them I thought immediately of Beauty and the Beast but had to wait until the credits to have it confirmed that it was indeed Menken who'd written the score – so they're of course competent, but Rapunzel's song about her longings is very much the sort of song you'd see in any musical, and it's unfortunately rather bland, without any special hooks to catch the listener. Unless it's sung by a very special voice, it becomes mainly exposition – the images accompanying it are good, but not strong enough to carry the number by themselves.

The number where the evil "mom" Gothel undermines poor Rapunzel by telling her how weak she is and how evil the world is is better, but I sat there wishing for more of a Scar quality to Gothel's performance – I think some controlled over-the-top evil à la Jeremy Irons would have made this song strong enough to stand on its own, instead of just being another musical number.

But then come the strengths. The story is strong and complex; the Disney story men have really done their job on this one. There is drama, and plenty of it, with several conflicts going on at once – unlike the horrible overlong TV special Chicken Little, this really is worthy of a feature film and capable gripping and moving the viewer. There are strong characters, great sight gags, a clever plot device to symbolize Rapunzel's longings that carries the film forward and adds emotional poignancy to it, and an intelligent way for her to discover who she really is without resorting to simplistic tricks or deus ex machina. And the animation is just gorgeous.

Textures, body language and movement, slapstick gags, 3-D – they're all marvelous. The film simply looks great (well, except for the character designer making the women's eyes way too large, unbalancing their faces; that failed). Best of all is... the horse.

Maximus is the horse of the captain of the king's guard, and he's determined to catch the thief he starts the film hunting – Flynn Rider, the movie's hero. Maximus has a fantastic range of expressions, and he goes through them at a rapid-but-not-too-rapid clip that is a joy to behold. Whoever animated him did an outstanding job, and although he isn't one of the lead characters, he takes away any scene that he's in – almost like Thumper.

Considering that I've even seen some idiotic faux-"feminist" complaint that Mulan was anti-woman – because of the law that made it a crime for a woman to join the army, and because Mulan's soldier training made her strong (to quote the great Dave Barry: I am not making this up) – I expect there will somewhere be somebody who'll claim that Tangled is anti-woman because Gothel is an evil controlling mother. Don't listen to that person, or anybody else who's trying to convince you that you shouldn't watch this wonderful film, because they are not your friends.

This may be computer animation and 3-D instead of classical animation, but it's nevertheless classical Disney. Recommended.